From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pilliard Dickle is a cartoonist, best known for the unusual
poster calendars he draws. Each one is based on a
different theme: castles, palaces, ships, pyramids, trains,
planets. The Associated Press describes Dickle's
calendars as "a yearlong trip through a cartoon fantasy land."

Pilliard Dickle's Castle Calendar

Pilliard Dickle is not only the artist's pen name (his real name
is Joe Chandler) but a character in the calendars - a sort of
chronological Marco
Polo on a mission is to explore the future and make detailed
drawings of the years he discovers.

Dickle's
Calendars

Each of Dickle's calendars is accompanied by a story. It's the
artist's illustrated diary of his travels through time. The
calendars are set in a land called Calendaria, populated by a cast
of characters with names like Captain Navaron Tyme, Sonny Day and
his wife Doris (no relation) and The Daybreaker, who goes from year
to year stealing Tuesdays. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
describes the calendars as "forms of creative fiction," adding that
looking over a Pilliard Dickle calendar is "somewhat akin to
reading a picaresque novel."

After selling his calendars at art shows throughout the eastern
US, Dickle rose to national attention when movie critic Gene Shalit delivered a
startlingly rave review of his calendars on The Today
Show on NBC in 1986, devoting more time to Dickle's calendars
than all other calendars combined. This, plus a spate of other
media attention, brought Dickle a small but faithful legion of
collectors around the world.

His calendars and stories have been published as a book, The
Calendar World of Pilliard Dickle (Longstreet Press, Atlanta,1989).
The Calendar Marketing Association awarded Dickle's 2005 calendar
The World Calendar Award as Most Original Poster calendar.

Pilliard Dickle, calendar artist

Synesthesia

Dickle attributes his unusual calendar art to a condition he has
had since childhood called synesthesia, a perceptual anomaly that
affects about one in 25,000 people. It’s a cross-wiring of the
senses that occurs in the left hemisphere of the brain. A person
with synesthesia may hear colors, taste sounds or feel shapes. In
Dickle’s case, he says he vizualizes the passage of time.

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a visual concept of time,”
Dickle explained in the newsletter he mails to his collectors.
”Days, weeks and months have distinct shapes and colors. If
somebody says, ‘I’ll see you next Tuesday,’ I picture WHERE Tuesday
is. I see its shape and color.”